A Killer Without Regret

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A Killer Without Regret

Carl Panzram

Carl Panzram

In the summer of 1920, a 29-year-old son of Minnesota farmers docked his boat (acquired with stolen money) at a small island in New York City's East River. One by one he hired out-of-work sailors to crew for him. And one by one, he shot them in the head with a Colt .45 and dumped their bodies in the water.

Before he was executed in 1930, Carl Panzram put the sailor body tally at 10 although he estimated that was only about half his total murder count. "For all these things, I am not in the least sorry," he wrotein a jail house confessional. "I was so full of hate that there was no room in me for such feelings as love, pity, kindness or honor or decency."

Panzram still blazed with rage on the day of his execution. He spat in the executioner's face. When asked if he had any last words, he snapped, "Yes, hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard. I could kill ten men while you're fooling around."

I was working on a story about another early 20th century killer when I first read about Panzram, infamous for his outspoken delight in the death of others. His story haunted me; it was so incandescent with hate. And it was Panzram who came back to me (not the lunatic killer of my actual research) with the Friday mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, another story of a killer consumed, somehow, by the need to harm others.

In fact – as far as we know – these two killers have very little in common except for what appears to be the same blaze of hatred that burns away all else. Panzram was a career criminal, first arrested when he was eight-years-old, and although he liked a good gun, he just as readily killed with a rock, a crowbar, his bare hands. He was surrounded by imperfect human beings, he once explained, and "I reform them by making them dead."

James Holmes, the 24-year-old graduate student arrested after the early morning massacre in Aurora, Colorado (12 dead, 59 injured during a barrage of bullets fired midnight viewing of the movie, The Dark Knight Rises) hasn't been so nearly so forthcoming. "He's somewhat of an enigma," a law enforcement officialtoldThe New York Times.

We know he was in a neuroscience PhD program at the University of Colorado-Denver medical school, that he was in the process of withdrawing from that program. We know that neighbors from his home in San Diego, California described him as a nice kid and a shy one. We know that he booby-trapped his Denver apartment with explosives and in the last two months purchased (legally) four guns. We know that he used three of them – an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun and a .40-caliber Glock handgun – in the shooting. We know that he tossed two canisters into the theatre that hissed with smoke before he started shooting. That he was wearing a gas mask and a bullet proof vest. That he was silent during the shooting and, witnesses said, robot calm.

And that he was, like Panzram, and many other such killers, more and more of a loner. Holmes' neighbors in Denver do not describe a shy, sweet man but a withdrawn one, a man who mostly burrowed alone into his apartment at night, keeping it dark and isolated. A man whorarelybothered to acknowledge his fellow residents when they passed in the building's hallways. Panzram claimed that he preferred solitude anyway. The presence of others rubbed him wrong, like sandpaper or splintered wood.

We, the others, struggle to understand this kind of murderous alienation.

James Holmes

James Holmes

"What is it that makes individual members of a usually empathetic species turn rogue?" asked a storyin Time magazine five years ago, after Seung-Hui Cho, an English major at Virginia Tech, shot to death 27 fellow students and five instructors before killing himself. Cho had a long history of known mental health problems but that does not appear to be true for Holmes. The dilemma is typified by the caseof Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, mostly children, in Norway last year. The Norwegian prosecutors have argued that no sane person would have carried out such a massacre, that Breivik is suffering from a delusional form of schizophrenia. Breivik insists that he is sane, that he was driven by hatred of a too tolerant, too inclusive society. Jared Lee Loughner, who last January opened fire on a community meeting held by then Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, told a simiilar story. He killed six people and injured another 13, including the congresswoman. Was it a "toxic cocktail" of poisonous rhetoric and mental instability that pushed him into murder?, askeda Newsweek story.

We should also ask such questions. And we should ask why we make it so easy for troubled loners like Holmes to acquire multiple semi-automatic weapons and a military engagement's worth of ammunition (reportedly some 6,000 rounds). We do – if we want to be smart about this – need to find a way to quit so readily arming the angry and the alienated, break the pattern created by Holmes and Loughner and Breivik and Cho and their like. Because, the truth is, there will always be another loner with a grudge.

The potential to hate beyond reason has long been part of human nature. Back in Carl Panzram's day, psychiatrists who worked with criminals went by a different name. They were called alienists. The term referred to specialists who worked with people alienated from society, alienated from what Panzram himself called the basic decency of human behavior. It's period piece terminology but it still makes a certain sense – a sense of killers so alien to the rest of us. And Panzram, if nothing else, illustrated the the razor-fine line between hatred and despair. Holmes hasn't been formally charged yet and we don't know if he will express regret. But we have this from Panzram: "My only regret is that I wasn't born dead or not at all."